MyBB Fans is proud to present a public MyBB 1.4 preview. This is your chance to try out MyBB 1.4, including Admin CP and Mod CP!The important link: http://beta.mybbfans.com/mybb_140b
You can up yourself to an administrator once you are registered.
Please read the stickies on the forum, and at the MyBB 1.4 Discussion Board at MyBB Fans for more details on known issues.
Enjoy your time 
We’re back. Sorry about the downtime. Hopefully this won’t happen again.
Yesterday support member Ryan Ashbrook left the MyBB team. An official announcement is yet to be made on the community forums. I will however note that in a conversation I had with him on MSN this morning he said he is still going to participate in MyBB and MyBB Fans, and that he has no intention of leaving his friends at MyBB. He also said he will continue to support the various plugins he has released for MyBB in the foreseeable future.
Well thanks Ryan, you have been a fantastic support member. I wish you luck with your future endeavours .
As PHP6 is around the corner and PHP5 has been released for over three years, PHP is officially discontinuing development of their 4.4.x branch at the end of this year except to patch critical security issues.
In tandem with this, the MyBB Group will be dropping support for PHP4 for the next feature release (i.e., 1.6.0 or 2.0.0) coming in 2008. Some new features that PHP5 has provided are much better OOP features, a “MySQL-Improved” extension and many new built-in functions. Many of these new features are not backwards-compatible with PHP4 which meant that the MyBB Group had to find ways to allow both versions of PHP to return the same result.
With the termination of PHP4 support, MyBB developers can fully capture and utilize the “new” (not really since PHP5 is 3 years old) features that were released in PHP5 without having to worry about backward-compatibility. Thus, the MyBB code can be more streamlined and show improved performance.
Of course this move comes with a price: MyBB users on web hosts with PHP4 will not be able to use newer versions of MyBB (after 1.4.x).
MyBB isn’t the only PHP application going in this direction. See GoPHP5 for a listing of other projects taking part in this motion.
Do you think this move is a good idea? Does your host still use PHP4? Leave your comments 
The MyBB Group has started beta testing MyBB 1.2.10, the next maintenance release in the MyBB 1.2.x branch. The lucky few have already been selected. It is unknown whether or not there will be subsequent “rounds” of beta testing since this is a minor release.
MyBB 1.2.10 fixes the bugs since the last maintenance release. It will be the last scheduled maintenance release before MyBB 1.4.0, the major upgrade that everybody has been anxiously waiting for.
So expect to see MyBB 1.2.10 being released soon, marking one step closer to MyBB 1.4.0
Some of you may be interested what may be going on in the life of the MyBB Fans Staff (excluding me, I’m just the news guy) considering not much has happened with this website, nor the theme contest which is well overdue for a winner. I’ll also update you with information on MyBB.
labrocca, an active user at the MyBB Community Forums came up with a list of 10 (actually 11) reasons why he chose to convert from vBulletin to MyBB. Here’s what he posted (slightly edited):
1. vB isn’t free (obvious one I know)
2. vB skinning is difficult and often good skins cost money
3. vB has a bloated system and you can’t remove parts you don’t need
4. vB upgrading is an incredible hassle while MyBB has a near perfect upgrade system
5. MyBB has an excellent plugin system that if used properly requires no core file changes
6. Tikitiki is cool
7. MyBB has been steadily advancing it’s code base for resource efficiency
8. MyBB requirements are less than vB allowing for smaller sites to thrive on cheap hosts
9. AJAX features…yes I know vB has some too but MyBB uses them with efficiency and sensability
10. Quick learning curve and vB is a nightmare to understand. There are dozens of settings in vB that are plain ridiculous
11. Fast easy install…yes you do this normally just once but MyBB makes it really easy
Now in turn I ask you, what made you choose MyBB over another bulletin board software?
As I have pointed out on the Theming contest forum, MyBBFans’ theming competition comes to a close in just seven days, on August 1st. This means themers have just one week to submit or finish their themes. You might want to hurry up if your theme isn’t ready yet. Good luck to everyone involved. It’s going to be a hard time to decide which theme wins.
So there I was, idling in the mybb irc channel happily minding my own business developing one of my not so secret, super secret projects when Chris suddenly becomes active and slaps us all in the face by teasing us about more 1.4 features.
<surfichris> new user management is going to be kick ass.
Oh it is, is it surfi? Does this mean I must drop everything and report on everything you’re about to say on mybbfans’ blog? I believe it does!
When asked what sort of changes he was making to the user management. More control for the admins, code revisions and optimisations or just cosmetic changes. He gleefully responded “all the above”! Maybe we will be seeing the sort of control that DennisTT’s Additional User Settings provides by default in mybb. Probably more as he went on to promise something totally unique, unseen in other modern forum packages.
As exciting as the above is, he didn’t stop there. He went on to tell us about some of the advanced search features in 1.4.
I ask you, what do you think of saved searches? Tell me in the comments.
Saved search, where you specify a search in your user cp and when you want to look through the results they are instantly available and up to date. Say for instance you want to keep up to date on the latest speculations on mybb 1.4 in the community forums. Well you would specify a new saved search for “mybb 1.4”. Then when you come back you will have an up to date list of all the threads and posts with “mybb 1.4”, no need to re-enter data into the search page. “So what?” I hear you say. You can go to the search page and re-enter the data to research with very little inconvenience. Its not exactly a revolutionary new feature. Well as the users might be able to use the results as an RSS feed to search your site for the bits they are interested in without even visiting your website, the main advantage is to the admin and not the users. The users would only have access to the threads and posts, as an admin you have access to all the information on your forum, information which is now search-able.
<surfichris> say you wanted had an IP address you wished to track
<surfichris> you could possibly create a view called “All users with 127.0.0.1″ as their IP.
So we can generate reports on our users activity. If all the search functions have been turned into a centralised class, there is practically nothing now which cannot be searched. He also announced that plugins and modifications can use the search features!
<surfichris> and say you wanted to implement this idea of “View” in a modification
<surfichris> you could possibly call it via build_x_view($view_properties)
<surfichris> so that way people could integrate it elsewhere
Wow, exciting stuff. MyBB 1.4 looks set to change the way we administer our forums for ever. Maybe phpbb version 4 will be up to par in a decades time.
- MiNT
Tikitiki has released details about some of the back end features relating to the database. Mybb 1.4 will support databases other than the typical MySQL database. If your forum is particularly large then you will be happy to know that features have been implemented to make your forum take the pressure of your ever growing userbase.
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